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Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate
The Mercury Theatre was a small theatre on Ladbroke Road, Notting Hill Gate, London, notable for the productions of poetic dramas between 1933 and 1956, and as the home of the Ballet Rambert until 1987. History (founding) The Mercury Theatre was opened in 1933 by Ashley Dukes for the production of new drama and to serve as a centre for the Ballet Rambert, run by his wife Marie Rambert. The building, at 2, Ladbroke Road, London W11, had been built in 1851 as a Sunday school for the adjacent Congregational Chapel, but was extensively altered to serve as a theatre. It was a well-equipped but small venue, seating about 150. Productions The style was set by the first production, ''Jupiter Translated'', an adaptation of Molière's ''Amphitryon'' by Walter James Turner with a ballet by Rupert Doone as entr'acte. Vladimir Rosing's ''British Opera Group'' was in residence for several weeks in June 1935. The theatre's reputation was further established in 1935 by the first London ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Notting Hill Gate
Notting Hill Gate is one of the main thoroughfares of Notting Hill, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Historically the street was a location for toll gates, from which it derives its modern name. Location At Ossington Street/Kensington Palace Gardens, the Bayswater Road becomes Notting Hill Gate, continuing westward until it becomes Holland Park Avenue, just before it reaches Ladbroke Grove. Notting Hill Gate is distinct from Notting Hill, although the two are often confused, with "Notting Hill" being used as an abbreviation of "Notting Hill Gate" and "Notting Hill Gate" suggesting to outsiders that it is the full description of Notting Hill. In fact, however, the street named Notting Hill Gate is well to the south of the hill (with its summit at the junction of Ladbroke Grove and Kensington Park Gardens) which gives its name to the area known (long before the establishment of the Notting Hill toll gate) as Notting Hill. Character Notting Hill Gate is home ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism, earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The tragedy '' Long Day's Journey into Night'' is often included on lists of the finest U.S. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's ''A Streetcar Named Desire'' and Arthur Miller's ''Death of a Salesman''. O'Neill's plays were among the first to include speeches in American English vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society. They struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into disillusion and despair. Of his very few comedies, only one is well-known (''Ah, Wilderness!'').The Eugene O'Neill Foundation newsletter: "''Now I Ask You'', along with ''The M ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Red Shoes (1948 Film)
''The Red Shoes'' is a 1948 British drama film written, directed, and produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It follows Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), a ballerina who joins the world renowned Ballet Lermontov, owned and operated by Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), who tests her dedication to the ballet by making her choose between her career and her romance with composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring). It marked the feature film debut of Shearer, an established ballerina, and also features Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine, and Ludmilla Tchérina, other renowned dancers from the ballet world. The plot is based on the 1845 eponymous fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen, and features a ballet within it by the same title, also adapted from the Andersen work. ''The Red Shoes'' was filmmaking team Powell and Pressburger's tenth collaboration and follow-up to 1947's ''Black Narcissus''. It had originally been conceived by Powell and producer Alexander Korda in the 1930 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Powell And Pressburger
The British film-making partnership of Michael Powell (1905–1990) and Emeric Pressburger (1902–1988)—together often known as The Archers, the name of their production company—made a series of influential films in the 1940s and 1950s. Their collaborations—24 films between 1939 and 1972—were mainly derived from original stories by Pressburger with the script written by both Pressburger and Powell. Powell did most of the directing while Pressburger did most of the work of the producer and also assisted with the editing, especially the way the music was used. Unusually, the pair shared a writer-director-producer credit for most of their films. The best-known of these are ''The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp'' (1943), ''A Canterbury Tale'' (1944), ''I Know Where I'm Going!'' (1945), '' A Matter of Life and Death'' (1946), ''Black Narcissus'' (1947), '' The Red Shoes'' (1948), and ''The Tales of Hoffmann'' (1951). In 1981, Powell and Pressburger were recognised for thei ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Maids
''The Maids'' (french: Les Bonnes, links=no) is a 1947 play by the French dramatist Jean Genet. It was first performed at the Théâtre de l'Athénée in Paris in a production that opened on 17 April 1947, which Louis Jouvet directed. The play has been revived in France, England, and the United States on multiple occasions, sometimes with men playing the roles of the maids. A TV dramatization Stuepigerne was done by Danish national broadcaster Danmarks Radio in 1962. A film adaptation of the play was released in 1974. Swedish composer adapted the play in 1994 for a chamber opera. Background Genet loosely based his play on the infamous sisters Christine and Léa Papin, who brutally murdered their employer and her daughter in Le Mans, France, in 1933. In an introduction written for ''The Maids'', Jean-Paul Sartre quotes a line from Genet's novel ''Our Lady of the Flowers'' in which a character muses that if he had a play written for women he'd cast adolescent boys in the pa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean Genet
Jean Genet (; – ) was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. In his early life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but he later became a writer and playwright. His major works include the novels ''The Thief's Journal'' and ''Our Lady of the Flowers'' and the plays ''The Balcony'', ''The Maids'' and ''The Screens''. Biography Early life Genet's mother was a prostitute who raised him for the first seven months of his life before placing him for adoption. Thereafter Genet was raised in the provincial town of Alligny-en-Morvan, in the Nièvre department of central France. His foster family was headed by a carpenter and, according to Edmund White's biography, was loving and attentive. While he received excellent grades in school, his childhood involved a series of attempts at running away and incidents of petty theft. After the death of his foster mother, Genet was placed with an elderly couple but remained with them less than two years. Accord ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Saroyan
William Saroyan (; August 31, 1908 – May 18, 1981) was an Armenian-American novelist, playwright, and short story writer. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940, and in 1943 won the Academy Award for Best Story for the film ''The Human Comedy''. When the studio rejected his original 240-page treatment, he turned it into a novel, '' The Human Comedy.'' Saroyan is regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Saroyan wrote extensively about the Armenian immigrant life in California. Many of his stories and plays are set in his native Fresno. Some of his best-known works are ''The Time of Your Life'', ''My Name Is Aram'' and '' My Heart's in the Highlands''. His two collections of short stories from the 1930s, ''Inhale Exhale'' (1936) and ''The Daring Young Man On the Flying Trapeze'' (1941) are regarded as among his major achievements and essential documents of the cultural history of the period on the American West Coast. He has been described in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Donagh MacDonagh
Donagh MacDonagh (22 November 1912 – 1 January 1968) was an Irish writer, judge, presenter, broadcaster, and playwright. Personal life MacDonagh was born in Dublin on St Cecilia's Day in 1912. He was still a young child when his father Thomas MacDonagh, an Irish nationalist and poet, was executed in 1916. Tragedy struck again when his mother, Muriel Gifford, died of a heart attack a year afterwards while swimming at Skerries to Lambay, County Dublin on 9 July 1917. The two children were then taken care of by their maternal aunts, in particular Catherine Wilson. His parents' families then engaged in a series of custody lawsuits, as the MacDonaghs were Roman Catholic and the Giffords were Protestant; in the climate of '' Ne Temere'', the MacDonaghs were successful. He and his sister Barbara (who later married actor Liam Redmond) lived briefly with their paternal aunt Eleanor Bingham, County Clare before being put into the custody of strangers until their late teens, when the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Phoenix Too Frequent
''A Phoenix Too Frequent'' is a one-act stage comedy in blank verse by Christopher Fry, originally produced at the Mercury Theatre, London in 1946. It has been adapted for television numerous times, in Britain and other countries, but has been less frequently revived in the theatre. The play depicts a grieving widow in Ancient Greece gradually finding the attractions of a young soldier outweighing her determination to join her husband in the underworld. Background and first production The Mercury Theatre, in Notting Hill Gate, London, was opened by Ashley Dukes in 1933. Part of its brief was to present new, experimental drama, and before the Second World War plays by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and others were presented there. After the war the Mercury continued to present new plays. In April 1946 the theatre staged a double bill, comprising the first British performance of ''The Resurrection'' by W. B. Yeats and the world premiere of Fry's ''A Phoenix Too Fr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christopher Fry
Christopher Fry (18 December 1907 – 30 June 2005) was an English poet and playwright. He is best known for his verse dramas, especially ''The Lady's Not for Burning'', which made him a major force in theatre in the 1940s and 1950s. Biography Early life Fry was born as Arthur Hammond Harris in Bristol, the son of Charles John Harris, a master builder who retired early to work full-time as a licensed Lay Reader in the Church of England, and his wife Emma Marguerite Fry Hammond Harris. While still young, he took his mother's maiden name because, on very tenuous grounds, he believed her to be related to the 19th-century Quaker prison reformer Elizabeth Fry. He adopted Elizabeth Fry's faith, and became a Quaker. After attending Bedford Modern School, where he wrote amateur plays, he became a schoolteacher, working at the Bedford Froebel Kindergarten and Hazelwood School in Limpsfield, Surrey. In the 1920s, he met the writer Robert Gittings, who became a lifelong friend. Caree ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anne Ridler
Anne Barbara Ridler OBE (née Bradby) (30 July 1912 – 15 October 2001) was a British poet and Faber and Faber editor, selecting the Faber ''A Little Book of Modern Verse'' with T. S. Eliot (1941). Her ''Collected Poems'' ( Carcanet Press) were published in 1994. She turned to libretto work and verse plays; it was later in life that she earned official recognition, receiving an OBE in 2001. Early life Ridler was the daughter of Henry Bradby, housemaster at Rugby School in Rugby, Warwickshire, England, where she was born. Her mother, Violet Bradby, born Milford, wrote popular children's stories and was the sister of Humphrey S. Milford, Publisher to the University of Oxford. One of her great-grandfathers was Charles Richard Sumner, Bishop of Winchester, a brother of John Bird Sumner, Archbishop of Canterbury. Her uncle, G. F. Bradby, was the author of ''The Lanchester Tradition'' (1919), while her aunt Barbara Bradby was the joint author of ''The Village Labourer'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Times
''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (founded in 1821) are published by Times Newspapers, since 1981 a subsidiary of News UK, in turn wholly owned by News Corp. ''The Times'' and ''The Sunday Times'', which do not share editorial staff, were founded independently and have only had common ownership since 1966. In general, the political position of ''The Times'' is considered to be centre-right. ''The Times'' is the first newspaper to have borne that name, lending it to numerous other papers around the world, such as ''The Times of India'', ''The New York Times'', and more recently, digital-first publications such as TheTimesBlog.com (Since 2017). In countries where these other titles are popular, the newspaper is often referred to as , or as , although the newspaper is of nationa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
